Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that doesn’t justify a full post. For example:

  • Something interesting that happened to you
  • Something humourous that happened to you
  • Something frustrating that happened to you
  • A quick question
  • A request for recommendations
  • Pictures of your pet
  • A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like a hippo
  • Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
      4·
      7 months ago

      Thanks for sorting that! I guess that explains why I suddenly got a bunch of old notifications this morning from .world. :)

      • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
        3·
        7 months ago

        Haha yes, my inbox going crazy is one way I knew it was working!

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      3·
      6 months ago

      An update, we are up to date with Lemmy.world! Aussie.zone still in dire straights, but I have messaged to see if they are aware and to offer assistance.

      graph showing last 30 days where activities behing lemmy.world grew and grew for lemmy.nz and aussie.zone, with lemmy.nz sharply falling to 0 over the last couple of days and aussie.zone still increasing

  • eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nzEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    I just bought a multimeter. I better learn how to use one now 😅

    Been contemplating powering my outdoor lighting again. Starting to think about getting one of those Bluetti or Ecoflow portable power stations. Or even making my own and getting an inverter and a lifepo4 deep cycle battery. I would also need a charger for it I guess, I’m not sure I would save any money either. It’s also a lot more than I wanted to spend on this. Why does everything have to be expensive!

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      2·
      6 months ago

      So much for wanting a solution that wasn’t so expensive! It does sound like a fun project, though. For you, not for me, I’d be worried about electrocuting myself 😆

      • eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nzEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Haha yeah I haven’t committed to anything yet. It’s just the cheaper options I’m not 100% sure are going to work correctly and if I that happens I’m going to have to spend even more to fix it anyway!

        But I’ve thought about making a portable solar charging station for a long time to learn a bit of how it all works. I’ve found there is actually a lot of information online for setting up solar and batteries in the RV/camping and vanlife communities, although it’s definitely overkill to just power some lights 😂

        I’m not as nervous around batteries as I am around messing with 240V. I know it’s all dangerous though, I’ll do a lot of reading first before I do anything I’m not sure about. Got to make life a little exciting somehow 😁

        • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
          2·
          6 months ago

          I assumed it was 240v, since you have normal plugs for plugging in to, right? I guess with lights you can set it up specifically for the lights and get away with a lot lower voltage.

          • eagleeyedtiger@lemmy.nzEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            The inverter will be for converting 12v to 240v. I think it’s just simply wiring it to the 12v lithium battery, then plug in lights to inverter. I can’t find a simple answer on if it’s possible to convert the lights to use DC and it seems way more difficult, even though I lose some efficiency from using an inverter. If I ever add more I’d go the route of looking for DC powered lighting.

            Inverter will be handy though as I could use the battery in a power outage to power other things as well.

            • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
              2·
              6 months ago

              It will be interesting to hear what you decide to go with and how it works out. Good luck!

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
    4·
    6 months ago

    Came across a new vegan restaurant in Welly called September, which is turning into one of my go-to joints. So far I’ve had their Mapo Tofu, Laksa and Stir Fried Veggies with Tofu, and they’ve all been top-notch. And unlike Aunty Mena’s, their food isn’t bland - and when I ask them to make it spicy, they make it proper Asian-spicy, which is awesome. 10/10 would recommend.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      3·
      6 months ago

      That looks good! 50+ reviews and an average of 5 stars, that’s pretty impressive!

      I’ll have to give it a go some day, unfortunately I almost never go down that end of town. I used to work near there about 5 years ago but now work closer to the train station end of town, or actually from home most of the time, in which both have less interesting food choices than the Manners St area.

    • BalpeenHammer@lemmy.nz
      2·
      6 months ago

      I am going to report you to David Seymour and the woke police. You have admitted to eating woke food in a woke restaurant at the capital city no less.

  • Lee Duna@lemmy.nzEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Just bought Lenovo laptop, and thinking to start using Linux as daily OS, dual boot with Windows as I still need Lenovo Vantage.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      3·
      6 months ago

      I hadn’t heard of Lenovo Vantage but came across this reddit thread that led me to this github page that might do the job for you?

      If you don’t have another windows machine then I think it’s a good idea to duel boot Windows initially. I’ve been running Linux as a daily driver the past couple of years but still occasionally do stuff in Windows. It’s pretty rare these days, though!

      • Lee Duna@lemmy.nzEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Woahh thanks a lot Dave! Very interesting thread, I’ll try on my V14 first maybe also X240 later.

        If you don’t have another windows machine then I think it’s a good idea to duel boot Windows initially. I’ve been running Linux as a daily driver the past couple of years but still occasionally do stuff in Windows. It’s pretty rare these days, though!

        Yup I was thinking to start familiarize myself with Linux as a daily driver. I still need Windows for some times, because of .xlsx files from work used a lot of formulas and VBA.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
          3·
          6 months ago

          Macros are one reason for me as well. LibreOffice actually supports VBA! But only a subset, so YMMV.

          If it’s for work then probably also best to avoid converting back and forth between Word and LibreOffice as well.

          I’ve been pretty happy with Linux though. I’m currently running the Gnome version of Nobara but have been through a few distros to get here. I ended up keeping my files on a separate partition to make it easy to install a new OS so I could test out a bunch.

          None were perfect but I’m pretty happy with what I have now.

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
      3·
      6 months ago

      Nice, welcome to the club! Been using a ThinkPad Z13 for the past couple of years exclusively with Linux (Fedora Atomic) and it has been an excellent experience, with everything working OOTB and decent battery life too. I do have a copy of Windows installed in a VM, but use it only for dev/test stuff.

  • Albatr0ss@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Just got my flu vaccination, hardly felt it. Reminder to go get yours as well, if you haven’t already! The way the health system is at the moment, the more preventative stuff we can do, the better.

  • terraborra@lemmy.nz
    3·
    6 months ago

    Does anyone use Hot Shot as their ISP?

    I’m moving house and eyeing up a new fibre provider. They look very reasonably priced and a quick search of reddit and geekzone suggests their uptime is good. However im more concerned about whether I will get pinged for “reasonable use” under their unlimited plans given that I use between 200-400GB a month and sometimes more.

    Despite slingshot being extremely expensive they at least haven’t said anything when I’ve hit 700GB in a month. It’d also be a dealbreaker if Hot Shot does port blocking with no way to control it and selectively open ports.

    • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
      3·
      6 months ago

      I haven’t heard of Hot Shot, but 200-400GB seems like reasonable usage to me. Especially taking into account 4K streaming, and stuff like video game downloads being 100+GB, that figure actually would seem pretty conservative IMO.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      2·
      6 months ago

      I haven’t heard of them, but if someone advertised unlimited internet and cut you off for 400GB of data then I think they would get in trouble for false advertising. If you average 400GB a month and occasionally hit 700 or 1TB I wouldn’t expect to have issues.

      I often hit 5TB+ and never even considered I might hit a fair use policy. 1TB or less is well within the “I just watch a lot of Netflix” defence and so I wouldn’t be too worried about it.

      • terraborra@lemmy.nz
        2·
        6 months ago

        I guess I haven’t really compared my usage to others in quite some time. I did think it’d be defensible given there’s usually a 80GB+ patch or game install each month but just didn’t want the hassle of having to explain each month if I could avoid it.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
          1·
          6 months ago

          Yeah, you usage is pretty normal these days, for the reason you describe. You’re not the only one having to download 80GB updates or 150GB games off Steam, pretty common these days.

          Here’s our usage for the past few months. Just changed to this ISP in December which is why that’s so low:

          graph of internet usage showing over 6000GB almost every month

          It did actually surprise me to learn how much we use. At the last ISP they didn’t tell you how much you used, so I never knew. When we switched to this ISP I thought something must be wrong 😆